Why Your Meta Campaigns Attract Users Who Never Pay | Anas Maqsood

Anas Maqsood is a performance marketer with 5+ years in consumer subscription apps, previously running paid UA at ExpressVPN and EA Sports, now consulting on attribution and signal engineering. In this episode, we talk about how to make Meta optimize for users who actually pay, not users who start a trial and cancel an hour later. Anas breaks down what a qualified trial is and how to build one, why your target event is locked the moment an ad set launches and how to A/B test events around that. He also covers why Meta and your MMP will never show the same numbers, and how a CAPI + MMP setup gets you 90–95% conversion data instead of 70–80%. Timecodes: 00:00:00 — Introduction 00:03:58 — Are free trials a scam? 00:07:25 — The budget math nobody does 00:09:50 — Backend-enriched events at $100K+ spend 00:14:22 — Is the learning phase still real? 00:17:23 — Testing ad sets vs evergreen campaigns 00:22:23 — SKAN explained, and who it actually helps 00:28:42 — Team structure at $9M a month vs at $50K 00:34:35 — What not to build under $50K a month Say 👋 to Anas   / anasmaqsood